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Browser Vendors Force W3C To Scrap HTML 5 Codecs
snydeq writes "Major browser vendors have been unable to agree on an encoding format they will support in their products, forcing the W3C to drop audio and video codecs from HTML 5, the forthcoming W3C spec that has been viewed as a threat to Flash, Silverlight, and similar technologies. 'After an inordinate amount of discussions on the situation, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is no suitable codec that all vendors are willing to implement and ship,' HTML 5 editor Ian Hickson wrote to the whatwg mailing list. Apple, for its part, won't support Ogg Theora in QuickTime, expressing concerns over patents despite the fact that the codec can be used royalty-free. Opera and Mozilla oppose using H.264 due to licensing and distribution issues. Google has similar reservations, despite already using H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome. Microsoft has made no commitment to support <video>."
See, this is something that open source accomplishes that stupid fucking arrogant businesses will never get. When something is obsolete or no longer needed, it gets ditched or replaced by something better. Don't keep it around because someone thinks that they have the right to continue being in business even though their shit is a decade out of date. Its a hard and cold life for the developer whose project gets ditched (And sometimes I feel bad for them), but in the end, the user wins big and things evolve.
But of course, the rest of the world lives in reality, so the user loses.
Fuck you Microsoft. Die already!
Fuck you Adobe. Die already!
Fuck you Java. Die already!
Fuck you too Realnetworks. Just because.
Perhaps it is a stupid question but why do the vendors have a say what goes into the spec and what doesn't? Isn't it up to them to choose to implement the spec fully or not? FFS just make it Ogg Vorbis/Theora and if Apple doesn't want to support it then Safari can just not support that part of the spec. It isn't like any of the browser are 100% complient anyway.
Apple, for its part, won't support Ogg Theora in QuickTime, expressing concerns over patents despite the fact that the codec can be used royalty-free.
Or perhaps their concern is precisely because of this fact?
Wasn't the decision to force everyone to support OGG/Theora dropped months ago?
Never mind that there are no hardware codecs for either, which is probably a huge part of why there was external pressure to avoid forcing a codec on everyone.
What's with Apple? They had no problem paying Sorenson Media in the past. What, specifically, is wrong with Theora?
sig: sauer
That refuses to set a standard because people who should be implement it say they won't? Simply choose the most appropriate technology, detail the requirements fully in your standard. It's then a matter for the vendors to decide if they wish to make a standards compliant product or not. The point of a standards body is to put the interests of the general public first. Failure to do this is failure to fulfil their purpose. Doing so because of what are effectively bullying tactics is even worse as you've just decided to put corporate interests ahead of people's. First ISO corrupts itself into virtual irrelevance now we're seeing W3C fail. Are there any standards bodies left with the tenacity to get their job done?
I can see smiles on the part of Microsoft. In the meantime, if I were Adobe, I would open up everything that has to do with Flash so that Flash does not become irrelevant.
So not counting Microsoft (which has had nothing to say on the matter, and therefore cannot be counted one way or another), the only party blocking this is Apple, and they're blocking it based solely on a trumped-up and prima facie invalid argument, and furthermore, an argument that has never once impeded any of Apple's past actions. In other words, "BAWWWWW they din pik my pet codec BAWWWWW i wants every1 usin only my codec BAWWWWW BAWWWWW BAWWWWW!"
Seriously, folks; QuickTime uses a plug-in architecture for a reason. If Apple were truly concerned about Theora and patents, all they'd need to do is implement it as a plug-in -something they should have absolutely no trouble doing, as it's their own architecture- which could then be trivially removed if the need ever arose. But no; this is a step back towards the bad old days of Not-Invented-Here syndrome at Apple.
"Microsoft has made no commitment to support video"
They're working on their own enhanced marqueeflashvideo tag.
I can't wait.
It's not just Apple, though. MS will probably not implement Theora either. Google will not be using it for anything substantial because of substandard quality per bit. The fact is that nothing is gained by making it a spec requirement. Either vendors will implement Theora or they won't, having it in the spec won't change anything. So why even have it, if that's the case?
They don't know who to pay.
First...
Have you even *used* Safari, Webkit, or any Webkit derived browsers?
Why would they care what Apple/Webkit supports? Um, besides the fact that 65% of mobile browsing is currently with a Webkit based browser, golly, I can't think of any.
Someone please mod this idiot Troll.
Second...
But, I agree with others ... that they shouldn't care what *any* browsers currently support. Make it part of the spec and the users will decide. FireFox users will use ogg, Webkit based browsers will use h.264... I really don't see the issue here.
Seems to be more of a 'if you won't play my game, we just won't play ... I'm taking my ball and going home' behavior that really isn't helping the situation to me...
Set SOMETHING as a standard and wait for the dust to settle LATER to change things. Mozilla and Google are right to support something that is open first; plugins can support more but by default, only open standards should be a standard otherwise you are supporting a vendor.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
The video and audio tags are staying; they're just not specifying a particular codec that needs to be supported. I don't see what the problem is.
How about making the browser use system (DirectShow on Windows, whatever-it's-called on Linux) codecs, so everybody could be using whatever codec they want. Look, a lot of media players on Windows (like WMP and MPC) use DirectShow, so thew users can install additional codecs.
Why they want to include the codecs in the browsers. This way is worse. If system codecs were used, then the sites could choose whether to use h.264, ogg or some other codec, like XviD.
Also, this way all of the patent/license/whatever issues for the browser vendors would go away. And if the users are watching video files on their computers they most likely have codecs already installed.
Firefox should simply support Ogg theora and stop any effort to get the video tag off html5 distribution. If Microsoft and Apple do not want to support this, it is their right to ignore it. Let us just make sure Ogg Theora is really safe and it has no sunset or submarine patent lurking beneath it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Fuck Apple too. They are as bad as it comes. No less than microsoft.
If no browser will support the codecs then webmasters wont use html 5 and stick with html4. When IE owned a significant marketshare a couple of years ago the web evolution slowed down to a halt. Firefox can't adopt H.264 because its patented and Firefox can be shutdown if a lawsuit over infringement takes place.
And Firefox does not have a significant enough marketshare for developers to care about Ogg Vorbis/Theora. Besides all the professional tools do not support it so it wont ever be used. It wont ever be used because professional tools do not support. Its a catch-22 just like Microsoft Windows and Office. You can't ever leave the platform.
If silverlight and flash work on 95% of the market why switch?
http://saveie6.com/
My understanding is that Apple doesn't want to work on QuickTime because it is buggy and no one wants to fix it.
Dayum. If Google has a problem with HTML5 <video>, they did a really good job of hiding it at Google I/O.
-=Maggie Leber=-
No one said Google hates video. Google is not happy with the quality of Theora (they find it to be unacceptable to use for, say, YouTube). Google is definitely on board with HTML 5 and the video tag -- they've already implemented it in Chrome with Theora support AFAIK.
Why would be Theora included in the spec? it just plain sucks. Furthermore, is better to have multiple options to choose from. So, the solution is that broswers use the codecs already installed on the PC so they don't need to implement every codec out there.
Safari is a great browser, at least on the Mac. I much prefer it to Firefox.
I take it that you've never used Safari. Well, either that or you're one of those people that can't use a browser unless it's Firefox with a few dozen weird extensions. Pretty much every (previously old-school UNIX-using) mac user I know uses Safari for their everyday browsing because it's fast, has a nice UI and is one of the best browsers when it comes to standards compliance.
/Mikael
PLEASE NOTE: As I stated but which I have no doubt that some troll will miss, practically all mac users I know personally are people who previously used other UNIX systems, not "liberal arts majors who get confused by more than one mouse button" or any crap like that.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
While I understand Google's problems with Theora quality it is surprising for them to be against it (which is what I assume is their official position for Theora support in the video tag?). By the time HTML5 is all finished I am sure Theora will be good enough and if they are unsure that it will be why can't they help it along with a few $$ or directly helping with development for it?
What is this Real Browser(TM) to which you speak of? I use Safari because it works with my bank's website. Go to it with Firefox or Opera and you get an error message.
On a daily basis I use Safari and Opera.
Webkit is being used by others now (Google Chrome) and right now over 80% of our hits from mobile browsers are Safari/iPhone.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Video was a piece of bait for forcing HTML5 down everyone's throats. Now can we move on to dropping the whole spec?
Vendors never actually mean what they say. Here are the real reasons:
Apple won't support a codec that's incompatible with its huge installed base of ipods and iphones. They don't care about royalty fees because most Safari users pay for an OS X licence, and they want the free browsers to look sub-par compared with theirs.
Microsoft won't support a codec that makes the web more reliable for non-Windows users - especially Linux users. They don't care about royalty fees because all IE users pay for a WIndows licence, and they want the free browsers to look sub-par compared with theirs.
Google, Opera and Mozilla won't support anything that puts them at risk of needing to pay royalties on the huge number of free downloads they give away.
Nobody actually cares about end users or developers. If you think they do, you're kidding yourself.
You can still make use of the tag in a cross platform way. Video For Everybody Is a simple set of code that uses the video tag with only two input files - an ogg and an mp4 - and lets the tag work for, well, everyone. IE6? Check. Safari? Check. iPhone? Yep.
It falls back to whatever method works for playback - including using Flash to play the h.264 if it needs to.
It's pretty funny to see so many people bitching about Apple not supporting ogg when Microsoft ignores the tag altogether. Everyone, start supporting the video tag today as widespread use is the only way to get big companies to fully adopt it - perhaps that will motivate Apple to someday support ogg.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Fuck you Microsoft. Die already!
Fuck you Adobe. Die already!
Fuck you Java. Die already!
Fuck you too Realnetworks. Just because.
Not "Just because". Fuck Real for producing crappy software that doesn't fit in anywhere at makes it annoyingly non-trivial to download things I want to watch.
Fuck Adobe for Flash. Seriously, I don't need vector graphics in my web browser. I'd love to have embedded .wmv/.avi/.mpeg files, whatever, because I can play those with mplayer which DOES NOT SUCK. As opposed to flash.
Fuck Microsoft for being the great browser market retardant. And in general for writing shitty software which doesn't do what I want it to (heck, I can't even get XP to install; epic fail).
And fuck Apple for being such control freaks. Well, first, fuck 'em for not helping fix this browser shit. Secondly, fuck them for being a worse control freak than Microsoft could ever be. I recently played with an iPhone (display/sales demo); among the top 25 apps in the store is one that displays scantily clad women, which are "as naked as Apple will let us get away with". FFS, Apple. Don't decide whether I'm going to watch porn on my phone. And you include a web browser---is that porn-filtered too? Assholes.
But don't fuck with Java. It's free software. It works for what it does: sorting algorithm animations and interactive Rubik's cube algorithm display. Java is OK, when used in moderation.
Flame on ;-)
what they did, is just one brain fart out of this quote from:
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-June/020620.html
"I considered requiring Ogg Theora support in the spec, since we do have
three implementations that are willing to implement it, but it wouldn't
help get us true interoperabiliy, since the people who are willing to
implement it are willing to do so regardless of the spec, and the people
who aren't are not going to be swayed by what the spec says."
There's no word about "cutting theora" just considerations that some companies won't comply with the spec.
But I guess this is somehow normal with new specs...
Don't stop there, Fuck everyone!
And you too! Yes you, staring at the screen...
Well, you're wrong. There's a major release coming up.
i can specify a font to use on a webpage, but support for that font is all over the place, and often depends upon the underlying operating system
of course, the font not being there means what font is used degrades to some sort of default according to the browser. but in css, you can actually specify the degrade path. example:
p{font-family:"Times New Roman",Georgia,Serif}
which basically means: use times new roman for this paragraph. you don't have it? then use georgia. you don't have that? then use any serif font you have laying around. you don't have that? then... (and the browser does something default)
the point being, you could do the same with codecs. of course, different codec means different source files, but that's ok, use a value pair in the css. something like
where, much like font-family css, the codec css style specifies a degradation path. but unlike font, it includes value pairs, one value being the codec to use, the other value being the file source to use if that codec is available
of course, my little example is not the best nomenclature, but the basic idea is sound to solve this browser vendor vs html5 standard imbroglio
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
IANAL, but...You know what would be great? If you could say "I want to do this, this and this," and if any of them violated patents, the patent holders would be kind enough/required to mention that during the planning stage, long before you implement it.
Kind of a "If any man has any reason why these two technologies should not be joined in holy awesome-ness, let him speak now or forever hold his lawsuit" phase.
Then if it turns out you are infringing the patent, oh well, you gave them ample time to mention it.
Of course, this implies that the patents were held for the sole purpose of protecting your technology, and not just to get money off of poor suckers who use it. It would also require both parties to be honest (yeah, right!).
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
Apple, for its part, won't support Ogg Theora in QuickTime, expressing concerns over patents despite the fact that the codec can be used royalty-free.
I don't think they're concerned about whether they'll pay royalties. The problem they have is not being able to charge royalties.
As for IE...I've pretty much given up on Microsoft ever doing anything helpful with their browser. "Embrace Extend Exterminate" might not officially be their mantra these days, but it's still how they operate.
Porquoi?
Since when has displaying proprietary media been so disconcerting to Mozilla, they have no problem recommending proprietary plugins for pdf, Flash, etc. If you really have an issue with it with regards to licensing, why not just have a separate plugin team, and whenever someone stumbles upon an H.264 video tag, have them install the plugin. Yes, it's not as ideologically, nor technically pure, but otherwise we're going to be fighting over this for years.
We all love to assume its cause they are all big businesses out trying to screw the consumer, but its just not that simple. Microsoft, Google, Apple, are all large companies with a lot of money. I deal with this issue everyday at Boeing. As developers we would LOVE to use more open source, however we can't.
Let me give you an easy scenario. We use an OSS lib and fully abide by the license thinking we are safe. What we can't control is who contributes to the project. If a random developer adds code to the project that he doesn't own that is a huge problem. There is no one checking to make sure that contributors are not violating others intellectual property. What happens next is the original author finds out, and sees $$$. They don't go after the developers that copied code, they go after the large company and sue. There are always exceptions to the rule, but companies are not going to put themselves (and shareholders investments) at risk just because we all think that it will be convenient to have the video tag in html5.
Why not specify some new optional standards: HTML5-AVC, HTML5-THEORA, etc. -- each should specify a minimum feature set so encoding profiles will be easy to make. If you make optional standards like this, browsers may be pressured into supporting them when they become the last browser to not support something.
You realise that Snow Leopard, shipping in September, comes with a new version of QuickTime, right? QuickTime 7 is not 64-bit clean, which is a large part of the reason for the rewrite.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This is the moment for open software browsers to get advantage of new technologies and gain market! If well played this can suppose the quantum leap that can become FOSS the desktop king.
Mozilla certainly DOES care about end-users and developers. Unlike the others, they have NO reason to do anything OTHER than produce a high-quality browser. (They're not perfect, but at least they have every incentive to try.) The problem is that the U.S. patent system makes it illegal for community-developed software to implement patent-encumbered standards. Mozilla, etc., would be happy to include other codecs if it were legal for them to do so.
At this time, there's only one practical pair of open standards for video and audio: Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis. Other audio/video formats, like MP3 and H.*, are not open standards. It would cost almost NOTHING for Microsoft and Apple to implement the Ogg open standards; the only reason they don't include them is because (for various reasons) they explicitly do NOT want open standards to succeed. So the lines are pretty clear here: There's only one practical pair of open standards (Ogg Vorbis and Theora), open standards are good for end-users (eliminating control of others over their data), it's illegal for Mozilla etc. to include the other formats, and the other organizations are working hard to prevent adoption of open standards that would cost nearly nothing for them to implement.
There's a simple solution, anyway. Now that Firefox has Theora and Vorbis built-in, various OSS-friendly sites like Wikipedia should just switch and REQUIRE that to view audio/video, users MUST have support. Then users have a reason to demand support for unencumbered standards... or switch to browsers that implement the unencumbered standards. Codecs have a chicken-and-egg problem, but with enough material and enough users, they become a virtuous cycle. Eventually, the other browsers will need to implement open standards, or they will get killed by their competition. And once there's an open standard in place that is "good enough", it will get harder and harder (over time) to justify using the non-open formats.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
I don't see how google can even pretend that youtube has video quality standards.
Getting "everyone" to agree on a single standard often times proves to be next to impossible. What ends up happening is that a large player in the market *coughMICROSOFTcough* ends up doing things their way.
The summary seems to suggest that it comes down to H.264 and Ogg. Why don't they just implement a [video:] tag and leave it up to the browser to decide? The webmaster will have to make both encodings available, and as a community we're still in the days of having to support the quirks of multiple browsers, but how is that any different than now? At least everyone would be one step closer to open standards like Ogg.
It would be nice to see the community just throw their weight behind Ogg and be done with it. If a large majority of webmasters out there simply decided to use Ogg it would solve the "problem" of needing the browser vendors to agree on a standard.
I've used the Windows version of Safari for about a week. It was installed along with a boat load of other crap (Quicktime, Quicktime Updater service, half a dozen iTunes services). Something which Chrome, Adobe and Java are all guilty of.
Killed it because it was slow, buggy and terrible to use. IE7 was faster and better.
Killed iTunes soon after, upon finding floola (something which didn't need three days to fill the bloody thing up every time it destroyed its indexes).
Basically, Theora and Vorbis are huge unknowns with potential patent bombs in them
I take it Apple also doesn't implement topological sorting, then. That must be why I remember pressing "recalculate" in my spreadsheets.
No, wait... hmm. All I can conclude is that software patents suck.
Thanks, I was wondering when you would chime in to tell us your preference. Whew, now I can sleep. THREAD'S OVER EVERYONE, ABIGOR HAS TOLD US THAT HE LIKES SAFARI! dumbass.
I just find that phrase a bit quaint, in the present browser "market." I can point you to a few browsers you don't have to pay for, if you're interested.
-- My apologies if the above facts contain any opinions, or vice versa! --
While we're on the subject of opinions, I have to say that Safari is a pretty terrible browser. WebKit is the only thing that makes it useful, and I'd rather use Chrome if I want WebKit.
This one of the numerous examples of the US legal shithole hampering progress and innovation for the whole world. (Another ones are DVDs on Linux and the financial crisis.) Software patents make the world worse. Please, let the upcoming CAFC Bilski ruling invalidate all of them.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
It may or may not be, but it's not really relevant -- adding support for a new codec and/or file format doesn't require fixing the underlying system.
IMHO in the current situation including both h.264 and Theora in the spec would be the optimal solution. Why? Two reasons: WMA and WMV. Let's kill those two bastard formats, please? Without any codecs in the specification we'll have the exact same situation as we have today. In that case the whole HTML5 standard might as well die.
Just because the vendors do not agree to ship the codecs, that is not a reason for the codecs to be removed from the spec entirely. I assume each codec still needs some kind of unique identifier, and those identifiers should still be in there. The article is unclear on whether all mention of Ogg will be removed, or whether it simply will not be listed as required.
Oh, how the purists have been laid low by the browser, once again.
HTML is for text. Use a RIA if you want to do real interactive multimedia.
Anyway, the video tag meant about as much as SVG support--the Next Big Things that never really were.
Maybe Duke Nukem Forever will be done using SVG and HTML5!
Well yeah, the Windows version of Safari is kind of an odd beast, the mac version is a lot better IMHO.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Adobe must be ecstatic with this.
Mozilla isn't a penny-less organization working out of someone's garage. They earn a non-trivial revenue stream from the google searches in the browser and could easily have got a license from the MPEG group. Then we could have had a true standard for video for the web, one that's already in common use.
For real people that aren't watching copyleft movies in between sessions of tux racer, this will mean the continuation of flash video ironically in h.264 now increasingly.
So much for patents and copyright encouraging innovation. Not.
What we really need in HTML standarization:
I guess it is *only* Apple who wants to force W3C to drop video tag. And it is for a reason - their locking on about how l33t and nice is H.264 and how it should be used as standard somehow played much differently than they hoped for - most of alternatives addapting Theora!. I guess they are trying to lower Theora influence, but I guess it is too little and too late.
No one else see strange timing about showing up this article and release of FF3.5, where Theora as support is MAIN feature besides speed improvements? And FF3.5 demos, Dailymotion service and Video Bay shows that Apple simply DOES NOT CONTROL situation anymore. So they try to ruin the party while they can.
I guess Bill can welcome Jobs to the club. I thought with all release of new products they have changed...but I was wrong. They have gone totally sideways. When you have enough money, you are easy on spending and easy on how much you have left. When you have too much enough, it shows.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
So you need a new bank. All the browsers you mention support the necessary encryption for online banking. Sites that require only IE or Safari as a browser for a connection tell me that either their web developers have a bug up their butt, or they are just too lazy.. either way I wouldn't give em my business.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
This is just what I would expect from a Process that tries to "govern" browser innovation. Just like the most Inefficient Enterprise known to man, a Federal Government, these starry-eyed liberals are learning the hard way that you can't just say you want everyone to get along and expect anything to actually happen.
So much of computing has become tainted by unproven and fantastical liberal ideas, such as the Collectivization of memory by fiat (aka "virtual" memory) and a bloated, power-hungry Executive (monolithic kernels). The sooner we can move away from the european socialest and west-coast liberal traditions in software design, the better off we will be.
These companies should take a lesson from the free market and try to deliver a product that can beat their competition. Whoever proposes the best standard will win and we won't have to listen to whining on Slashdot about how everyone should just cooperate like losers.
Actually, it's Flash and Silverlight that are threatening HTML, not the other way around. Where do they find these kooks?
If apple or anyone else does not want to support an open standard that is free for anyone, including apple, to implement, then let apple fail in this position.
If people want to argue that free software is not good enough yet, let them know that they themselves can help contribute to make it as good as they want it to be.
This world is tired of proprietary, tyrannical software, and it's about time we have better open source/open standards/free software that can compete with copyright software.
Let the crappy proprietary software system fail all on it's own by allowing free/open competition. Proprietary software does nothing but hold society back, intellectually - which is obviously not a good thing.
Mozilla doesn't want to use the standard because it is the opposite: penniless and non-commercial. Its entire business plan is based on pushing users to do Google searches as that $50M in search fees is its only source of income.
"Penniless and non-commercial" aren't the words I would have chosen to describe an enterprise with $50-$80 million in revenues based on add-clicks.
Ignoring the tremendous improvements in the Thusnelda branch, if YouTube suddenly switched from severe H.26whatever overcompression to stock Theora with optimal settings (and everyone had libtheora and HTML 5 browsers), no one would notice the difference.
Untrue. Xiph has made heroic progress with Theora, but it's still a decade-old codec design and bitstream, and it's hard to imagine it catching up with xvid, let alone a good H.264 implementation.
YouTube certainly has quality issues, but things can be bad in more than one way at a time. There's nothing that less efficient codec would help them with. Note their top bitrate is 1280x720p30 at 2 Mbps.
Some samples compared Xiph's latest demo clips, with the same source encoded with VC-1 and x264 are here:
http://cid-bee3c9ac9541c85b.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/BBB%7C_Compare
x264 can do 640x352 with higher per pixel-quality than Theora can do at 400x224 at the same bitrate.
My video compression blog
It should be the webmaster who decides what video format to use, and it is the job of the standard to make that possible without creating too much hassle for the end-user.
Let me guess. You just got done watch 'Being There' again, right?
The PNG folks provide MNG, now all we need is an audio track added to that to make it an ideal solution for HTML 5.
> Apple, for its part, won't support Ogg Theora in QuickTime, expressing concerns over patents...
I think everyone is miss reading this. I don't think Apple is expressing concerns over Ogg patents, but is expressing concerns over THEIR pattens. I may be wrong, but I think Apple doesn't want Ogg but wants H.whatever so it can get royalties.
This is the kind of thing that makes me think html 5 will never be able to compete with Silverlight and Flash. Unless one browser maker is able to kill the competition, HTML 5 will always be straddled with getting all the big boys to reach concensus (a task worse than getting a UN resolution passed). Meanwhile, Flash, Silverlight, and Java FX will accellerate at a break-neck pace in their own little arms race.
The funny thing is there are royalty free codecs out there.
I don't think anyone's ever asserted patents against MPEG-1, H.263, or MP2 audio, and any patents would be due to expeire soon anyway.
If being patent and license free is the paramount concern, there's plenty of choices with much more mature implementations than Theora. I don't understand the exclusive focus on just a few immature codecs like Theora and to a lesser degree Dirac.
Now, the bigger challenge is weighing the cost of patent licensing versus the cost of bandwidth. H.264 pencils out cheaper than Theora in practice when bandwidth costs and audience size are compared (lower bandwisth==bigger audience with sufficient bandwidth for the content).
My video compression blog
Microsoft won't support a codec that makes the web more reliable for non-Windows users - especially Linux users.
Actually, the currently in beta Silverlight 3 supports WMV and H.264, and has an extensible Raw AV pipeline that would make implementing the Ogg codecs inside of Silverlight trivial.
And that technology is already impleented in Moonlight, so Linux users have access to it as well.
So, Microsoft is actively exactly doing that, and includig Mac and Linux users.
My video compression blog
Because Google, Apple and MS are not the Internet. Why should I have to pay fees for the right to put a video on my site?
Audio video codecs are outside the scope of HTML. Whatever it says in the HTML 5 spec about video codecs, that will not magically change the last 20 years of digital audio video away from MPEG to something else.
The current audio video standard is ISO MPEG-4 (2001) and the codecs are H.264/AAC. Supporting this standard is not an academic issue because the world is full of content as well as hardware and software players and authoring tools that conform to this standard. It's also the video in Flash and in YouTube, which is considered the de facto standard in "Web video". When people talk about Web video they usually mean YouTube or something very like it. They are talking about MPEG-4.
The MPEG-4 content that you find in the world and on the Web today includes:
- every song ever offered for sale in or purchased from iTunes Store
- every song ripped from a CD by iTunes since 2002
- every video ever made on a cell phone (3GPP is part of MPEG-4) including the iPhone's recent shoot, edit, upload to YouTube feature which is H.264/AAC
- every video on YouTube is stored as MPEG-4 (no matter what format you originally uploaded)
- almost all of the video that runs in Adobe Flash, excluding 320x240 movies which may be the old codec
- all of the consumer video shot on solid state storage, and most of it from a few years before that
- all Podcast video is H.264 and most Podcast audio is AAC
- Blu-Ray
Nobody has explained how all of this content would be transcoded to Ogg or other non-standard format in order to be published on the Web. Where would the computing time come from? How would it be practically done? What are you going to tell someone who wants to upload a video from their camera or phone directly to the Web? That they should transcode it into a non-standard audio video codec first?
The players are very important also, because they have H.264/AAC decoding HARDWARE, which enables them to work efficiently enough to run on batteries. You can't drop a new software codec into these, you have to drop in a replacement audio video decoder chip. These include:
- every iPod and all of their competitors, except for the ones that only play MP3 which is part of MPEG-2
- every PC with a recent NVIDIA GPU can decode H.264/AAC without breaking a sweat or busting its batteries because it happens in the GPU
- Internet set-top boxes such as AppleTV and Netflix
- PlayStation3 and other game boxes
- even the Zune has MPEG-4 hardware in it, although somewhat underutilized from what I hear
Even software players cannot so easily be modified to support a non-standard codec, because of the scope of the MPEG-4 support. We're talking about every Mac and every PC in the world, because they all have one or both of these:
- every QuickTime/iTunes since 2002 is MPEG-4
- every Adobe FlashPlayer version 9 or 10 is MPEG-4
The reason those 2 match both each other and all the hardware players is because of the benefits of standardization, which took place almost a decade ago for MPEG-4 and goes back further to previous MPEG versions. If you, or Mozilla, or anyone, wants to make an audio video player, they only need to conform to the MPEG-4 standard to enable their player to play all of the content from QuickTime/iTunes and Flash. You can come along in 2009 and decide to get your feet wet in audio video players and simply by following a published ISO specification you can have instant equality with QuickTime and Flash and others. Again, the benefit of standardization.
A very important consideration that is often completely ignored by Web-centric people as they talk about audio video is the authoring tools! People who make audio and video all day long also want to publish their work on the Web. MPEG-4 is standardized QuickTime, so there is not just 8 years of MPEG-4 authoring tools right now, there is almost 18 years of digital audio video practice realized in MPEG-4. A key feature here is that these tools must not make content that has a "content tax" on it, like
XHTML 2 is way cooler anyway. Why does anybody give a damn about HTML 5?
Side by side comparison of the two.
Also: why does Slashdot's extrans mode no longer seem to work? Having to include P tags in full HTML mode is annoying, and plaintext doesn't support links.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Ignoring the fact that apple are doing a complete quicktime rewrite for OS X 10.6 of course.
Aw frack me, I included an anchor in that previous link. Here it is again, corrected.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
F*ck you. And the horse you rode in on. Those SOBs don't want free codecs, because they can't compete or can't control people. The argument about patent concerns is nothing more than unmitigated fermented Horse manure. That BS argument can be turned around and pointed at EVERY OTHER CODEC as well.
HyperTEXT Markup Language. Why is W3C maling such a fuss about video? I'd rather have that they concentrate on making a good, consistent specification for HTML, than spend time on video. After all it's only been 10 years since 4.01 was published.
From the HTML 4.01 Spec:
src = uri [CT]
This attribute specifies the location of the image resource. Examples of widely recognized image formats include GIF, JPEG, and PNG.
Now true, that doesn't say that any formats are recommended, well at least not until you head to the W3C PNG specification:
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/PNG/
They also have a nice section on SVG:
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
The use of the word 'quality' and 'You Tube' in the same article, much less sentence is a bit jarring. Really, most of the You Tube stuff would look better in ASCII.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Apple is already betting on H.264 and it seems they'd like to keep their cards in the same deck.
While I think we should be highly critical of that reasoning, it's not without logic. The patent risk using H.264 is spread out across multiple vendors & users who've invested deeply into it already. Theora could very well have lower risk of a submarine patent (who's to say, that'd take a crystal ball into the future), but to Apple it's a new risk on top of the risks they already have.
What Apple is essentially asking here is, why should they put eggs in another basket for very little reward (for them)?
Basically the situation here is that someone has to be the first to step up and put some deep pocket risk for the sake of Theora. Firefox doesn't have those pockets, they're non-profit and despite conspiracy theorists they're not really backed by Google (as in, Google doesn't have their back on this).
The good side is that if just one of the big three players (Google, Apple or Microsoft) were to vouch for Theora, the other two are likely to jump in sooner or later. That's pretty much how H.264 gained traction, isn't it?
We don't know that Microsoft isn't implementing the video tag, the post on the mailing list simply says they have not commented on it.
Why would they care what Apple/Webkit supports? Um, besides the fact that 65% of mobile browsing is currently with a Webkit based browser, golly, I can't think of any.
WebKit supports Theora just as well as H.264. Chrome is WebKit and supports Theora. Theora support is just disabled in Safari.
MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
Webfonts (downloadable fonts), Workers (parallelism), Webforms 2, XHTML = XML while HTML 5 = incremental from HTML 4.
It's not "insightful" to list a bunch of things that are either in the spec already, in other specs, or way off base (what the hell, reversing fallback modes would be a disaster). How'd this clown get modded up for not having a clue?
On the other hand, Apple has been releasing proprietary, non-upgradeable hardware, forcing their users to pay a premium for the hardware, then forcing an upgrade to the customer, causing them to buy all new hardware, for most of the company's history since the Mac was invented. Apple's Proprietary business deals have stagnated their platform several times, but their "creative marketing' has always managed to create enough fanboys to turn almost every Mac user into a smug elitist bastard who points the flaws out in everyone else's product except their own. Microsoft has also been making progress in that marketing strategy, but has yet to achieve Apple's market share in holier-than-thou egotistical bastards.
Meanwhile, we Linux/Ubuntu smug elitist bastards continue to point out flaws in everyone else's production, including our own, constantly taking the defeatist attitude that Linux is "not ready for the desktop" despite the fact that, at this point, it's easier to install than all competitors' products and easier to admin, maintain and upgrade than all competitors' products,
...I didn't notice your point with all that self back patting going on.
In recent years, they have both been proponents of DRM at some point, both support their own proprietary formats (Microsoft with WMA/WMV/ASF
The WMV 9 video codec has been standardized as VC-1 via SMPTE. Its licensing is handled by MPEG-LA, like MPEG-2, MPEG-4 part 2, and H.264.
Apple with QuickTime, and AAC
QuickTime was the basis for and largely the same as the MPEG-4 file format.
AAC==Advanced Audio Codec. It's a MPEG technology originally created for MPEG-2. Apple is one of many implementors, and was not the primary developer (which was AT&T, I believe).
My video compression blog
What's really funny is, Youtube has pretty poor H.264 quality.
By tweaking x264 settings(B-frames and motion detection in particular), I've encoded videos to the same quality as Youtube at 1mbit.
(Mostly FRAPS vids of me playing games)
Mod up parent!
If you don't already, you should right articles professionally. Your comment is better than most of the tech press stories.
They are not dropping the tag from the standard, only the codec that it uses. Which is correct in my eyes. Html doesn't make dev's use a certain type of image with the tag, why restrict what the tag can do? Leave it open. Which is what they're doing. So that the tag is still in the standard and useable, but its up to the dev on which type of video to be played. Only seems logical.
Well, it's not like YouTube sells more ads with better looking video, and I doubt 90% of the uploads get watched more than a dozen times. They probably have some pretty deep metrics about the watts/cents per minute of video encoding and tune for that.
YouTube is also really only a good example of YouTube, since they're a massively money-losing operation funded by a very rich company. No one else does it like YouTube, and ever other video site is going to average a lot higher views/clip, so they can afford more CPU time to improve quality.
Or maybe they're just not very good at video compression :).
Beyond B-frames, they're not using 8x8 blocks or CABAC entropy coding, both of which can offer substantial efficiency improvements.
My video compression blog
Fuck the closed source players...
Mozilla and Google (no mention of Opera) both support Ogg Theora, if Google wants to support H.264 let them.
I say bring on the browser wars 2.0 - Make the standards Require Ogg Theora support.
From the HTML5 spec:
"This specification does not specify which image types are to be supported."
"Well, you're wrong."
I hope I'm wrong. I'm told that QuickTime is stable playing MPEG4 files, for example. I'm told that the implementation of QuickTime RTP (Real Time Protocol) has been buggy over several versions.
QuickTime does not behave well when a packet is lost.
Apple changes the QuickTime API without documenting it well.
QuickTime has historically been more stable on the Mac than the PC. I've had a problems with it on the PC.
subj.
IMHO in the current situation including both h.264 and Theora in the spec would be the optimal solution.
I totally agree with this. I don't think either Apple or Mozilla are wholly in the right, both should include both of these formats. Then we'd all have a decent choice as to what encoding we wanted to use, and as you say it would help to dispose of WMV.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No doubt. This tag is a bit of a game changer. Not only is the performance in (say) Firefox miles above what is even possible in Flash (allowing even a low-end system to play video), but it allows for a lot new, neat things to occur within/around/on the video. The "web designers" would undoubtedly latch onto its coolness pretty quickly.
Major sites that the young/hip demographic visits frequently (eg. collegehumor.com) start using it instead of flash (along with "please upgrade your browser to one that is HTML5 compliant, such as Firefox" message, or such) and suddenly compliant browsers have the browser majority. End result, uncompetitive, closed browsers have to start trying to compete on merit and implementation, not lock-in.
The biggest problem with the current specification is that it does not allow/provide a mechanism for DRM of any sort. This is likely problematic for sites such as Hulu, which would undoubtedly prefer to ditch Flash on technical merits but can not due to DRM/licensing/legal considerations.
Of course, the whole issue would be moot if Adobe decided to (drastically) improve the performance of flash video, I think. No matter how much geek/trendy appeal HTML5 had, if Flash (the status quo) wasn't sucking, people would have no reason to switch.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Oh dude, if this stuff ever gets off, they SO need to write an ASCII video overlay.
Just detect a color on the screen (10x10 pixel groups or something like that), convert to text, bham.
Should be as simple as the demo of inserting content onto another video tag (iPhone tracking one) that was demoed on Mozilla's site.
Hell, i will write it for them and release it as a userscript.
Linux is ready for the desktop except when someone uses it and runs into some problem, in which case we inform them that it's his fault for using a product that's not ready for the desktop yet.
Apple is not more expensive than other brands, except if you figure in non-premium brands and/or look at the whole market and not just the specific segments Apple caters to.
Mindows does not crash more often than other OSes unless you install third-party drivers in which case all bets are off - and of course one can not expect Microsoft to distribute drivers for every device on Earth.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
That's not an accurate way of looking at it. WebKit has no support for video codecs, period. WebKit delegates media decoding to the underlying platform, much like it does with image decoding. The WebKit tree (at http://svn.webkit.org/) supports three different media backends: QuickTime for Mac and Windows, GStreamer for GTK+, and Phonon for Qt. Both QuickTime and GStreamer have pluggable codec support, and WebKit-using applications will load any video that it has codec support for.
Not to mention even the cheapest GPUs out there come with H264 hardware acceleration. My $50 HD4650 came with H264, DivX, and WMV 9 out of the box. Does Ogg even have hardware acceleration at this point? With the rise of netbooks/Nettops, green computing and lower power machines you simply need hardware acceleration on the GPU. I know that even with my new dual AMD it is simply a nicer experience to have the video decoded by the GPU, not to mention it cuts down on the heat.
So unless Ogg comes out with a hardware decoder like yesterday and gets the big three (AMD, Intel, Nvidia) to pack it in with their drivers I see Ogg simply being a non starter. I mean who wants their machine to chug when they are watching 1080p? And many of the new ARM devices are packing in hardware H264, whereas I doubt that they would be able to decode Ogg without hardware acceleration. They just don't have the muscle and who wants to support a codec that won't even work on huge classes of devices?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
That's not an accurate way of looking at it. WebKit has no support for video codecs, period. WebKit delegates media decoding to the underlying platform, much like it does with image decoding.
I did say it supports Theora "just as well as" H.264. "Not at all for either" counts as "just as well". :) (I deliberately hedged my wording ther because I didn't know how it worked.) The point is that it's Safari (and Nokia's browser, etc.) that's relevant here, not WebKit.
MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
Microsoft and Apple want to force people to use their formats to chain us to their software. I DO NOT WANT Windows Media Player, and I DO NOT want Quicktime! They both suck for different reasons. We have an open standard to use, but as usual, people can't see past their own greed.
Does Ogg even have hardware acceleration at this point?
Nope. I don't know if anyone's even scoped a hardware implementation of VP3. There have been some VP6/7 DSP implementations, but no ASIC ones (ASIC have better power consumption).
Now, Theora is a pretty simple codec, so doing it in hardware would be a lot simpler than H.264 and probably simpler than VC-1. But it can take quite a few engineering years to refine a decoder for performant playback.
Of couree, performance isn't just the video decoder. It's the video and the audio decoder, and the whole pipeline to make sure you get smooth in-sync playback. Media pipelines are really hard, particularly if you're trying to implement them as part of a browser rendering model that never had to worry about timestamps, decoder buffers, etcetera.
My video compression blog
The comparison I made was not supposed to be between the best settings for both codecs. Yes, x264 can produce better quality videos than even Thusnelda. I was never saying that it couldn't.
Rather, my point was that the settings that YouTube is using right now on the majority of their videos is quite terrible, and if they really want to argue on the merits of quality then they perhaps should tweak the settings to their own site first so that they can actually demonstrate the qualities of the codec they are using before discounting Theora purely on quality grounds.
You're so busy trying to make your point, you've wandered off topic and forgot to read the essence of what I was saying:
Firefox supporting Theora doesn't equate to Google having their pockets into defending it if submarine patents surface. Your opinion on Mozilla's arrangements with Google won't change that, but go ahead and bash away on a topic that's essentially unrelated. This is why I call your ilk conspiracy theorists, because you're connecting dots that aren't there and you're so determined to draw them in, you don't realize the scope of what you're talking about is just plain off-topic.
Well, YouTube has three sets of settings:
Low bitrate H.263 + MP3
HQ bitrate H.264 + AAC-LC
HD bitrate H.264 + AAC-LC
The low bitrate, for whatever reason is keeping to the specs they've been using since launch, which are using the xvid implementation of old Sorenson Spark H.263 v1/MPEG-4 Part 2 Short Header. Maybe for device compatibility? Anyway, That's a codec about as old as the Theora bitstream, so we wouldn't expect it to be much better.
But I don't know that YouTube thinks it's "good enough" - they're offering higher quality modes, and that's what you get by default on the iPhone and other platforms. For whatever reason they're keeping around a legacy version, likely backwards comaptibility with some clients that don't do H.264 for whatever reason.
For the their high quality streams, Theora isn't competitive in quality. And for the highly compatible streams, Theora isn't competitive in compatibility.
So YouTube saying that Theora doesn't make sense for them makes sense to me. Therora doesn't an advantage in quality or compatibility for the streams they're doing.
Also, Big Buck Bunny isn't the best clip to extrapolate from, as it's really high quality lossless animation. To really see what YouTube needs to handle, try some lousy webcam, DV, and VOB rips. That's where H.264's in-loop deblocking filter give it a big advantage over other codecs, because it just gets smoother intead of blocky as the content gets more challenging.
Not to dismiss the excellent development work Xiph has done on Theora. The posts have been a fascinating read. But it's not plausible to me that anyone can make a business case for Theora over H.264, VC-1, or ASP licensing is available; the reduced bandwidth costs would be bigger than the actual real-world licensing fees for the real world examples I've thought of.
Theora's sweet spot would be in cases where MPEG-LA codec licenses simply aren't available for whatever reason. I imagine a fully refined Theora decoder would need fewer MIPS/pixel than H.264 High Profile, and perhaps even Baseline. But even in those cases, VC-1 Main Profile will probably offer similar performance with significantly better efficiency.
My video compression blog
There are more factors here than bitrate. For instance, on all my mobile devices h264 runs like crap. Theora on the other hand is a lot lighter on the CPU. This is streaming video we're talking about here, not a DVD or something -- I'll take a little less quality over hogging cycles anyday.
What are your mobile devices, and what's your media player? All the current ones that are meant for media playback include H.264 ASICs. And those are getting crazy good; the Zune HD's going to support 720p HD playback using the NVidia Tegra.
Lacking an ASIC, any Theora on devices would need to be done in sofware, and even a simple codec can be extremely taxing on a 400-600 MHz ARM. Even if it's playable it's going to eat battery like no tomorrow. I can imagine a really good implementation being able to maybe do 320x240 30p 500 Kbps Theora in software on a 600 MHz ARM, but that'd require a whole lot of tuning.
The VP3 bitstream predates device media, so I doubt it has any particular design tuning for them. It's very much a codec designed for x86, with a PPC port.
My video compression blog
But that's OK, as long as it's an "open" format, right?
Well... Yes. That's the whole point. Prevent licensing of video on the web from becoming a weapon.
Judging by your use of the scare quotes, you believe that MPEG LA licensing and standards bodies make it similarly open. You're totally wrong, even ignoring the changes coming in 2011. Theora is "open"; relevantly, it's open in that it can't be used by a cabal to smash FOSS, control the web, and dictate implementation of part 13 in client software.
Interesting, considering that I don't remember ever hearing about ASP or AVC hardware decoders until after those formats became popular. It would seem that the popularity of the codec defines whether a hardware decoder exists, not the other way around.
Just because video is the general demo example, doesn't mean that video is all that Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX, etc can do. The video tag only affects a subset of what these technologies are about. FFS why does everyone on Slashdot think that every web technology is either flat HTML or about delivering video. Silverlight isn't going to disappear because of the Video tag anymore than you throw away your whole tool box when you buy a new hammer. You might replace your old hammer(and when HTML 5 becomes standard the video tag will probably be the way to display video), but you don't throw away your screwdrivers.
The argument is over Ogg versus H.264, which is an ISO/IEC standard.
That means nothing! That it is a standard does not mean that it won't be used to smash FOSS and force DRM on everyone.
Man... This "standard" thing is killing me. WMV is a "standard", too (SMPTE 421M). This term is being thrown around, cynically, to muddy the waters.
Since I said CPU, I thought I was clear that I meant decoding in software.
Using mplayer, h264 will eat almost exactly twice the CPU time that theora uses with similarly encoded files.
Also, about the battery life -- I can get about 5-6 hours of playback time decoding purely on the CPU with an Atom N280. That's certainly not "eating up battery like no tomorrow."
You cannot argue with these people.
It's like arguing with Al Qaeda that the entire US should not immediately convert to Islam. All of your arguments are irrelevant in their idealistic minds.
Since I said CPU, I thought I was clear that I meant decoding in software.
Sure. But no device meant for media playback is going to use software decoding. It'll already have a decoder ASIC, typically with at least H.264 Baseline and VC-1 Main Profile. Either will offer better quality and much longer battery life in an ASIC implementation compared to a software Theora decoder.
Also, about the battery life -- I can get about 5-6 hours of playback time decoding purely on the CPU with an Atom N280.
IS that with a GMA500? That's capable of hardware accelerated MPEG-2, VC-1, and H.264 decoding.
My video compression blog
And all the open source vendors need to do to support MP4 and H264 out of the box is pay 5 million per year (the maximum cap - since there are no way of tracking the actual number of users). I am sure that a not for profit orginisation like Mozilla has that kind of cash lying around in their back pockets. I am pretty sure that this would be concidered an undue financial burden for Opera as well.
If it were not for this issue I mp3 and mpeg4 would be a happily agreed standard. (well except for microsoft - but its not like they are ever going to come to the party)...
What needs to happen is there needs to be a licensing provision that is usable by not for profit open source vendors. That could be a provision where an end user can pay a few dollars to be able to use the codecs with what ever software they see fit (hey it's money that they wouldn't otherwise be getting otherwise). Or it could be a smaller more affordable cap for a not for profit entity.
The browsers need to start supporting free codecs now. Streaming h.264 is free for now, but that party is going to end at the end of 2010. If YouTube has to start paying royalties for every h.264 stream they serve up you better bet the whole game is going to change.
Theora/Dirac/Whatever start looking real good when consider that it keeps the web "free". Imagine if you had to pay everytime you served up a jpeg on your website? If you want to serve video from your site in a couple years, you may have to. I say we pick an open format now, to avoid all that headache now.
You ended your comments with what should have been the beginning.
MPEG LA terms are going to be nastier in 2011.
Mozilla can't implement h.264.
If by "intelligent people" you mean corporations.
Software patents are stupid and bad for the web.
Was there anything else? I'm not sure more conversation is going to get us anywhere. You support h.264 for your reasons (software patents are good, and minuscule performance differences are more important than unencumbered software), and I don't for mine (I have FOSS to thank for my career and favorite activity, and I think that software patents are stupid).
There goes the neighborhood. it is not quite that simple... but... Apple, are you opensource or not? Somewhere in between? Between Microsoft and Apple or Microsoft and Ubuntu or Microsoft and Microsoft or Microsoft and the Supreme Court. Need I go on? Where is the zen and the namaste guys. Wake up...Mach 21... Jobs, me, whoever, we are only temps here. Alpha Bravo Charlie???
"... it is certainly stable playing MP4 profiles it supports..."
Agreed. And unstable or inoperable with other MP4 files. I'm told that even on the Mac, the free open source VLC Media player is often better.
Quicktime on the PC has been very buggy in my experience. That has given the entire trademark a negative connotation.
My original point was intended to be that Apple has damaged its reputation with its poor handling of Quicktime, in much the same way that Sun damaged its reputation with its poor handling of Java.
Thanks for clarifying some of the issues.
I've gotten the impression, possible in error, that the Quicktime code is so sloppy that the corporate will at Apple to fix it is just not there.
MPEG LA terms are going to be nastier in 2011.
And you know this, how?
Mozilla can't implement h.264.
Why not? It's easily licensable, and Mozilla has a pretty decent income.
If by "intelligent people" you mean corporations.
No, I mean "intelligent people." Corporations are just a legal/economic entity. People have to work to come up with new video compression techniques, etc.
Software patents are stupid and bad for the web.
Why are software patents stupid? Because you say so? Do you think there should be a difference between software and non-software patents? Why?
If someone should choose to spend their intellectual work in developing software, why should they be any less protected than someone who chooses to develop physical products and techniques? You are essentially arguing against innovation in software.
You support h.264 for your reasons (software patents are good, and minuscule performance differences are more important than unencumbered software),
My main reason is much simpler than that - Theora simply isn't implemented in very many places. H.264 is. The performance benefits are just gravy. And I wouldn't say that software patents are "good" - they're just a fact of life, and I don't see why software developers should be discriminated against compared to other types of developers/engineers/inventors/scientists.
It's not even that I "support H.264" - I think a decent Open Source video implementation would be great, but I'm pragmatic, and can see that Theora has practical problems (as does H.264).
I just wish slashdot would discuss these issues rationally, as they do at the W3C, rather than the one-sided fanatacism for anything Open Source.
(I have FOSS to thank for my career and favorite activity, and I think that software patents are stupid).
That's some profound and sophisticated reasoning right there.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Google is your friend, if those are serious questions for you.
I accept your opinions at face value; but now that you have expressed them, if you are intellectually honest, you will never again attempt to placate someone who is concerned about proprietary (pwned, ha!) software by implying that they have nothing to fear from an "ISO/IEC standard" (or ECMA, etc).
They arent concerned about patents preventing them from implementing Ogg Theora - they are concerned about people not being forced to pay them to use their quicktime patents.
They have the time, money, and developers they can devote to a new project around creating their own video codec. They then can tailor it to their needs, as far as bitrate, size, quality, etc... There will have to be some sacrifices, as you cant have your cake and eat it to. Meaning they won't get what they really want even if they create their own, but they will end up with what they need. Then sell it like its the best thing since sliced bread. I honestly like the majority, if not all Google services that I use. They code things very well, with the user in mind. So I feel with Google ripping the browser game wide open with Chrome's speed, it now has it's own browser, thus the motivation to go forward with a project like this. And I'm all for it. Call it Google Video and Google Audio (.gvf and .gaf)
'Gee Vee F' has a nice ring to it and might catch on like MP3.
FYI, it might work on some versions of the iPhone, running some versions of iPhoneOS, but V4E does not yet work on my 1st generation iPhone running iPhoneOS 2.2.1. Instead it shows the 'lego' image like it does when a page has flash. I sent an email to them, and they were grateful for the heads up, then thought they had fixed it, then replied back about a problem with iPhoneOS 3.0. I followed up letting them know I was not using 3.0 and havent heard anything further yet.
Ideally, in addition to all the embedded stuff, it would be nice if, perhaps in a small font, there were always regular A HREF's directly to the video files . While it does require a click, and may not play 'in the browser' on some platform/application combinations, as long as there is *some* video player installed that can play one of the available formats, it will at least be usable.
Interestingly, I just tried manually downloading the mp4 file to my apache server and making a simple A HREF, if I leave it as mp4, iPhone safari says it cant download it. If I rename it to .mov it appears to recognize it, but instead of calling the movie player it still just displays the brick. So I'm thinking the problem is either with the encoding, or possible with the mime-type, *not* with the fallback from flash to quicktime.
I hope there's a Windows version that removes the current version's unwanted claws from IE.
You sure do put a lot of energy into slagging Ogg, and you consistently neglect mention the advantage Ogg has over H.264: it is unencumbered by patents and therefore free for anybody to encode and/or play, on any hardware they wish.
I for one, am perfectly happy to burn a little extra bandwidth for that, and anyway I not buy your assertion that Ogg cannot close the bandwidth gap over time. After all, you are a Microsoftie with a vested interest in keeping video proprietary.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
You sure do put a lot of energy into slagging Ogg, and you consistently neglect mention the advantage Ogg has over H.264: it is unencumbered by patents and therefore free for anybody to encode and/or play, on any hardware they wish.
Oh, I don't have anything against Theora per se, nor Ogg in general. It's just people keep having highly unrealistic hopes for what it can do in terms of compression efficiency and ecossytem.
Codecs are hard, and it does no one any benefit to assume they're capable of things they simply aren't.
The Xiph blog posts on their optimization process for Theora have been excellent reading, and they've done really good work. But the bitstream itself simply isn't capable of what modern codecs are capable of already. I'm sure Theroa will continue to improve, but I don't see any reaosn why H.264 won't see improvements at least as quickly.
And H.265 is already in development, targeting new bistream features that will add further substantial efficiency improvements.
I for one, am perfectly happy to burn a little extra bandwidth for that, and anyway I not buy your assertion that Ogg cannot close the bandwidth gap over time. .
After all, you are a Microsoftie with a vested interest in keeping video proprietary
Eh, I work on Silverlight, where we have the Raw AV pipeline for managed code decoders. It's be trivial for any customer add Theora support to Silverlight if they want it. If anything, Theora would be a competitive advantage for Silverlight.
Also, I don't think anyone is talking about propritary codecs here, except for perhaps VP6. VC-1 and H.264 are both international standards, with licensing handled by MPEG-LA. They are patent encumbered, but are not propritary any more than MP3 or ASP are.
My video compression blog
While Google doesn't mind spending the money for H.264 or the risk of legal action of sleeper patents on Ogg technologies, other companies either already have alternative solutions or at least see Adobe Flash or Silverlight as a good enough solution that they're simply not interested in wasting time on dealing with CODEC related issues that they feel were solved a long time ago.
... well you know. Instead, the real issue is that W3C took what feels like 10 years to make even a simple update to HTML and in reality, if they were to mandate a specific CODEC as a minimum requirement to meet spec, it would be a total waste of time. I can justify this without ever saying patent, copyright or anything else of that sort.
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.NET CLR or Java VM. Now before you get carried away with which is better. Neither of them are even close to suitable to what's really needed. What's needed is a VM environment (more similar to .NET as opposed to JavaVM) that is capable of JIT compiling vectorized code for the native platform. Also, a context similar to canvas needs to be optimized for extremely high performance access by this VM and an standard, high end audio component needs to be present. The machine should natively support platform optimized mutexed queues and can even define a packet format that would make it possible to take advantage of things like EDMA on TI OMAP processors commonly used in mobile phones.
The issue is by no means even related to what CODEC is ideal today. That's just a crock of
Video playback requires that a minimum of 5 components are present in a browser
1) Source - the place where the data comes from. This should support file based (via HTTP for example), seekable stream based (via RTSP and RTP with support for STUN or alternate firewall traversal), live stream based (via RTP with SIP or XMPP for session negotiation as well as STUN, TURN, and/or ICE for firewall traversal).
2) Demultiplexers - these split streams into their individual elementary streams. RTP doesn't need to be multiplexed, however the clock resolution of RTP is too low to be useful for the most part. So using something like ISO13818-1:2000 transport stream beneath is a good idea. For file based, using the Quicktime container format or another for file based media must be supported. In reality, this is far more complex to sort out than the CODEC itself since it doesn't require a mathematician/DSP expert to design a new container format and therefore they're far more plentiful and all present their own challenges for stream synchronization.
3) Audio CODECs - no detail needed
4) Video CODECs - also no detail needed
5) Sinks - the place where data is finally synchronized and presented to the user. Generally this means embedding something like OpenGL or framebuffer contexts directly within the browser itself. Unless the browser is natively rendering to this format, all the layering issues generally present in plug-ins are equally problematic.
While a video tag might make it logically simple for the web designer to say "stick my video here", the real problem is, simply choosing a standard CODEC for audio and a standard CODEC for video is actually the easiest part. Heck, choose 10, if you have the rest of the architecture in place, you can choose 100 and it would make no difference in complexity. The CODECs once they're written, licensed, etc... are trivial.
The real problem is, how does the user receive the media. And how it's presented.
For this, the real solution to the problem of cross platform and cross browser compatibility is that W3C or Ecma needs to invest heavily into a virtual machine platform similar to
Where's this leading. Easy, why does W3C need to start a CODEC war when the solution is that the web site could provide the CODEC and demultiplexer using a scripting language or intermediate language (such as MSiL or Java Byte Code) that is ideally suitable for i
Users and webmasters, companies love open and documented standards. Well, some do... It doesn`t mean they are ready to declare a jihad to patent system.
The companies producing video (pros) and sites postprocessing them has no problem with MPEG body of standards. Device vendors, including professionals like Sony Pro does stick with the standards, that is all they need for now. They love H264 since it saves them billions in upstream (both digital and TCP/IP) and some people think they will join some patent guerilla warfare and move to Theora for what? Because it is included in Firefox?
What they want is a vendor neutral, documented and patent troll free standard which will be provided by multiple companies. MPEG4 provides it. It is in billions of devices now.
Also no need to make big scene about Safari/Apple/Webkit OS X. Install Theora quicktime codec pack from Xiph, it shows your Theora video. It should...
What if Apple is perfectly happy with AAC/H264/MPEG 4 base to put their billions to it?
People sound like Apple being a poor company who got abducted by MPEG body of standards which was essentially based on Quicktime specs. There is no such thing. Apple is happy and responsible for H264`s and MPEG4 base profiles take off.
The only company who isn`t happy with H264 and possibly whining is Microsoft. Each h264 video, legal or pirate is a hit to their lame wmedia division.
True enough, but there's huge network effects in play here and H.264 is settling in as the format of choice. There's a ton of graphics cards, standalones, portable video players, media center devices and whatnot shipping right now that has hardware H.264 acceleration and not Theora acceleration. So when content producers ask "Hmm, what format can the most people play?" the answer ends up being H.264 and not Theora, and the circle continues. If it ends up the way that you must support H.264, that shipping without it is like shipping a music player without MP3 support then Theora has basically lost already. It'll just become another wierd format noone outside slashdot is using until the H.264 patents expire. Maybe with a huge splash of Theora with Firefox 3.6 and YouTube there's still time to turn around, but not much.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Why can`t they implement H264? Money? Do you know how much money that organization does? Anyway, they can link to system frameworks (xine, quicktime, wmedia) and play the video. It is why Quicktime and Windows Media are called "Frameworks" and why Quicktime is that "big".
For political reasons? Well, I wish them a happy life with their unpatented Theora since I am not re-encoding or transcoding millions of hours because someone thinks patents, even by motion picture professionals are bad.
I think this is a good example of how software patents kill innovation and progress
I have still to receive a complaint from MS Word users.
Most people, even in an enterprise, do not use all the features in MS Word, then OO.org is a fine replacement for them.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... then MS is lost...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Some patent troll can come along and "own" Apple's Quicktime format because the troll says they have a patent on "bitrate encoding variabilities on the internet".
Apple want QT movies to be used so QT will be used to view them. They sell QT encoding suites. They sell QT players.
They don't want Theora used because that would remove one reason for QT to be paid for: if 95% of the market have to support Theora, why use the newer QT libs?
For more on this story, please watch the following interview video...oh crap.
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ
My understanding was that Mozilla does have that sort of cash due to it's deals with Google to promote Google search in the browser.
Vendors are flat-out declaring they will not cooperate on open-source unpatented web code.
But have you read the millions of patents in dozens of languages in over a hundred developed countries and made sure that none of them apply to Theora? At least with H.264, Apple owns a few patents itself and can counter-sue if someone sues Apple.
The w3c states what image formats are widely recognized. This is a statement of fact WRT modern web browsers, it is not any sort of requirement. The w3c does not just exist to define standards, it also does things like list products that follow its standards and other stuff said products do, so it is entirely reasonable to provide a summary of that.
And I have no idea where you get the idea that PNG is 'recommended'. The PNG format itself is a 'recommendation', which means 'if you use PNG, here is how we think you should do it'. It does not mean 'use PNG'.
At various points they have recommended the use of PNG over GIF, but that doesn't mean 'use PNG' either, it means 'don't use GIF, and here's an alternative'. And they stopped doing that when the patent expired.
At no point does the w3c say what formats are allowed or even required to be supported by browsers.
It's perfectly possible to build a 100% HTML 4.0 compliant web browser that will only display BMP image files and not JPEG, GIF, or PNG.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Except that Adobe Flash doesn't support hardware-accelerated decoding because of some silly pixel-format requirement.
Search the Adobe articles: they only mention acceleration of scaling.
You should take a look as some early Mac TV ads. They were all about the little team that was able to create PowerPoint-like printed material without having to use expensive outside services.
A lot of BS material is created by management, but it goes all the way back to the first Pointy-Haired-Primate (PHP) who used rocks for bullet points.
Last I heard, Mozilla is blocking this just as much as Apple is. They want Ogg and Apple doesn't. Apple(and other companies btw) wants H.264 and Mozilla doesn't. So who's the one blocking who? I don't see what the problem with Mozilla licensing an H.264 decoder is except they're too cheap to do it.
When 60+ percent* and increasing of all mobile web journeys come from iPhones, the other platforms fade away. You're mistaking the United States as a proxy for the entire world.
Da Blog
The point isn't that the video is quality, the point is to get the same visual quality using Ogg Vorbis as you have with H.264, your Ogg video is going to be a bigger file size. I think Youtube blows through $1 million USD per month on bandwidth using what they have now. Reducing their bandwidth and storage bills while maintaining visual quality is probably one of their top priorities.
I'm guessing you all have java, flash, safari, ect installed. YOUR FEEDING THE FIRE. remove them, remove oxygen from the fire. kthxbai.
There is a fundamental contraction between an "open" web and a "standards-based based" web.
The "open" web is Calvinball.
The are rules made up as you go along. It is a ragged and unruly and fast-paced game - and as shamelessly profit-oriented as a thieves bazaar.
The standards-based web is a committee product. Riven by corporate, nationalist, technological, and ideological rivalries.
It tries to please everyone. But the dominant players are always visible in the background. Mostly it ratifies decisions already in place.
The committee takes the politically correct local out of Hampstead. The entrepreneur the hyper-sonic out of L.A.
The geek gets his HTML 5 video tag. But Microsoft and Adobe remain free to take Flash and Silverlight wherever they want to go.
My understanding was that Mozilla does have that sort of cash due to it's deals with Google to promote Google search in the browser.
Good thing that Mozilla represents the entirety of open source software
I don't think anyone is talking about propritary codecs here, except for perhaps VP6. VC-1 and H.264 are both international standards, with licensing handled by MPEG-LA. They are patent encumbered, but are not propritary any more than MP3 or ASP are.
As is well know, and as you know, MP3 is proprietary. Surely you know the name Frauenhofer.
You are being disingenuous, but why should I expect anything different from an Microsoft employee? Patented means proprietary, please to not try to make words mean things that they do not.
I repeat my observation that you spend a very large amount of time posting FUD about Ogg Theora on slashdot. Who knows where else you spend time promulgating FUD about Ogg Theora?
Since you are a Microsoftie, I know that you will not just do the gentlemanly thing and let the issue lie, after all, your paycheque depends partly on your evangelistic activity, where the word evangelism is a well known Microsoft euphemism for FUD.
I repeat my assertion that Ogg Theora is already good enough for me, and likely is good enough for many besides myself, who do not care much about 3 DB more or less of streaming bandwidth, and who do care about freedom from proprietary restrictions and patent fees for video codecs.
The fact that you know a thing or two about codec technology does not make you any less of a FUDster, quite the contrary. See ya, wouldn't want to be ya.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Patented means proprietary, please to not try to make words mean things that they do not.
No, patent means patented. There's a qualitative difference between a format for which there are public and publshed interoperable standard, and one where the implementation details are private or only avialable under a specific license. You may not care for either model, but it's certainly a meaningful distinction, and a longstanding one in the digital media world. When people in the vieo industry speak of an "open standard" they mean publically available specifications and patent licenses available under RAND terms. A propritary codec would be used to describe, say, RealVideo 10 or Apple's ProRes, for which there isn't bitstream documentation or RAND licensing availble.
With an open standard, everyone's on equal ground in building interoperable implementations without any reverse engineering, and has equal abilty and pricing for licensing the patents.
The issue of whether those patents have a fee or not is obviously important, but somewhat orthogonal to openness. One could certainly have a free-to-implement technology that isn't documented, and hence wouldn't be considered "open."
And Theora is certainly patented as well; On2 has released their patents under an extremely flexible license, but they're still valid.
I repeat my assertion that Ogg Theora is already good enough for me, and likely is good enough for many besides myself, who do not care much about 3 DB more or less of streaming bandwidth, and who do care about freedom from proprietary restrictions and patent fees for video codecs.
I've never heard streaming bandwidth described in dB. Interesting metric; so 3 dB would be ~2x bandwidth difference at the same quality? Kind of elegent; I normally talk about that in terms of percentage, but since improvements are measured in dB, it could apply either way.
FWIW, codec engineers sweat blood for a 0.1 dB improvement. The cable industry has spent multiple billions of dollars to upgrade to H.264 set top boxes and infrastructure to get that ~3-4 dB improvement of H.264 over MPEG-2, expecting a much bigger payoff due to additioanl channels/services they can sell with those savings.
Anyway, if Theora does what you want it do, use it with my blessing. Good enough is by definition good enough. Like I said earlier, I work on Silverlight, and we've already got the infrastructure in Silverlight for 3rd parties to add new codec and format support in managed code.
My concern is mainly that a lot of people seem to be thinking that Theora is capable of things it isn't and won't be capable of. To whit:
Theora isn't ever going to be competitive with H.264 High Profile in compression efficiency. While it's certainly capable of futher improvement, H.264 implementatiosn are improving rapidly as well, so I doubt it'd ever need less than 2x the bandwidth for a particular quality level compared to best H.264 implementations at the time.
For the business models I've run some quikc numbers on, the extra bandwidth cost of Theora would cost more than any H.264 license fees saved.
Thus mainstream media sites, like YouTube, don't have any business reasons to adopt Thera; it'd be a net negative on their profitability.
If you think I'm mistaken on any of the above, I'd be very interested in disucussing your perspective. If you're asserting that there are markets where the above factors don't matter much, then I agree with you.
But if it's really important for this community to have a competitive codec without patent licensing requirements, then Theora (at least a Theora 1.0 bistream compatible version) may be a distraction.
I don't have a lot of hope for Dirac either; I've not seen any indication of a new approach to the challenges of marrying wavelts with motion estimation; once your intra and inter block sizes are radically different, things get quite challenging. Theora is likely to remain a superior choice than Dirac.
My video compression blog
Because even though Mozilla has some money, it cannot license H.264 with GPL compatible terms. They need a license that allows end users to modify and redistribute modified versions of Mozilla products (e.g. Firefox). The modified version could be a GPL licensed H.264 codec which has absolutely no browser code remaining. The patent owner, MPEG LA, is not happy with such licensing terms because if they license H.264 to Mozilla with such terms, every free software project has a license. Or if they grant such license, Mozilla is not rich enough for it...
I'm not parent poster that claimed such but here're my ideas about this:
I'd be happy with software patents given following further restrictions:
Notice that originally US patent system required implementation of said invention to be presented to patent officer. This requirement was then dropped because of heavy costs (for the officers or inventors, I don't know). With software, the cost of copying the invention to the patent officer is less than filing the patent so there is really no reason not to require reference implementation.
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Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
Yes, that's why PNG is a W3C recommendation and not a mandatory part of the spec. They don't generally put a gun to your head and tell you what graphics file formats to support, but they do give you a set of recommendations. PNG is an official W3C recommendation.
Fair point, but I think that's a little backwards, since video decoding is down in general purpose GPU instructions now. Implementing the hardware decoding would be relatively straightforward, if it was supported.
That said, I agree with the general gist of the discussion here: VP3 was never a format worth getting behind in its own right. What we need to do is get all the interested companies and organisations together to purchase and open H264 or something like that, in much the same way that Blender was purchased and opened. But it WOULD be nice to have workable, standard infrastructure in place first, and HTML5 audio/video support would have helped that a lot.
Then again, I'd much prefer just to have the major browsers let me include scalable, fluid, transparent graphics via SVG instead of crappy bitmaps and *shudder* flash.
As long as two browser vendors have an interest in different video codecs they will never all agree upon the same set.
If only there was a tag for putting a generic object on the page in specific spot with a specific size. that could access external applications and plug-ins for extended features. <cough> object tag </cough>
And a internet standard for specifying different media types so we could have fall-through handling. <cough> mime-types </cough>
I think the solution to this problem is getting good support for the object tag. and using its simple built in fall-through mechanism.
<object type="video/ogg" data="summer_vacation/video1.ogv">
<object type="video/other-browser-safe-format" data="summer_vacation/video1.bvf">
Your browser is terrible. Download <a href="http://goodbrowserorplugin.com"> this</a>.
</object>
</object>
or if storage space is a premium just have the inner object tag be a Web Application(flash, java) that plays the outer video. I think back to the early days of PNG support on the web and think nested object tags would have been nice if images already worked that way, but people don't like change. You could have given supporting browsers highquality PNG and non-supporting browsers GIFs or whatever. Rather than being forced to use the lowest common denominator.